The invention relates to an aircraft cooling system and to a method for operating an aircraft cooling system.
In modern commercial aircraft, normally at least one device to be cooled is provided in the area of a galley. The device to be cooled may be, for example, a trolley or a galley area which serves, for example, for storing food intended for distributing to the aircraft passengers. A galley device to be cooled can be supplied with cooling energy by means of a decentralized cooler assigned to the galley. The decentralized cooler may be, for example, configured in the form of an air chiller and be designed for operating with a two-phase coolant, i.e., a coolant which is converted from the liquid to the gaseous state when delivering cooling energy to the device to be cooled. The coolant of the air chiller delivers its cooling energy to an air flow which is blown into the galley device to be cooled after flowing through the air chiller.
Alternatively to this, the decentralized cooler may be configured in the form of an electrically operated refrigerator which generates cooling energy by means of an integrated refrigeration circuit and delivers it to the galley device to be cooled. Both a decentralized cooler configured in the form of an air chiller and a decentralized cooler configured in the form of a refrigerator generate waste heat in operation. This waste heat is released into the surroundings of the cooler, i.e., conducted into the aircraft cabin and must finally be removed from the aircraft cabin by means of the aircraft air conditioning system.
Furthermore, it is known, for example from DE 43 40 317 C2 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,513,500 or from EP 1 979 233 A1 and US 2009/000329 A1, to cool galley devices, such as, for example, trolleys or galley compartments filled with food by cooling stations which are arranged in the galley areas and supplied with cooling energy from a central cold-generating device. The cooling stations are connected via a cold transfer circuit to the decentralized cold-generating device, in which a liquid or a two-phase cold transfer medium circulates. The waste heat of a cooling system equipped with cooling stations and a central cold-generating device is normally delivered via a heat exchanger to ram air flowing through a ram air duct of the aircraft.